Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

Introduction
Anne Sivuoja with
Owe Ander, Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Jens Hesselager
The long nineteenth century (1780–1918) was the Golden Age of opera
all over Europe, both for composition and for performance. <strong>Opera</strong> became
entertainment for the new bourgeoisie and the educated classes after having
been for centuries mainly, although not exclusively, a courtly pleasure.
The architectural spaces where operas were performed were amongst the
largest secularised rooms in bourgeois society. Always centrally located,
the opera theatres offered performance possibilities, not only for opera, but
also for other types of musical performances (as Anne Reese Willén shows
in this volume).
Accelerating urbanisation and societal and social changes affected the
themes, settings and also the censorship of operas; Verdi’s operas, for example,
were important for the Risorgimento in Italy (and often under the
censor’s tight control). Elsewhere too opera became an important politico-cultural
tool for creating and transmitting appropriate national pasts,
presents and futures of different European nations and nation-states, as
well as a means of criticising the existing social order. <strong>Opera</strong> also served
as a means to hide politically sensitive issues by re-channelling public attention.
All of this could be done in a more disguised form in opera than in
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